Want to hit the jackpot like the Powerball winners? This science shows you how

I've never considered myself a lucky guy. But a recent morning in London changed all that.

As on the previous few days, I woke up, showered, and dressed, aiming to catch the 9 a.m. train to a morning appointment. But this day, I dawdled for a few minutes, still drowsy and jet-lagged. I decided to read and jot some notes. I'd catch the 10 a.m. train instead.

As I headed out, the hotel's proprietor told me, "There's a glitch at King's Cross." I lingered for a few minutes watching the BBC's report of a power surge at the station and grew increasingly annoyed because I was now so late. I set out along Gower Street toward King's Cross, hoping the problem would be patched up before I got there.

That's when, a few blocks away, right on my path, the bus exploded. Flames shot toward the sky. A wave of people rolled away from the blast. I just stood there, shocked.

This was last July 7, of course, the day London's transit system was attacked by terrorists. It was also a day I brushed up against my own mortality like never before. A brisk, punctual morning would have placed me at King's Cross a few minutes before the 9:00 train, just when the first bomb (the mis-reported power surge) exploded. And had I not stopped to watch the news reports, I might have been walking beside the bus when it exploded at 9:47.

I felt like a sleepwalking man who, upon waking, discovers he's just navigated a minefield. I felt truly, certifiably lucky.

What a coincidence, then, that I'd come to London to investigate ways to improve my luck. A recent rash of research, most notably that of the British psychologist Richard Wiseman, suggests that there's a lot more to luck than mere chance. Wiseman, the author of the best-selling book The Luck Factor, contends that not only can we understand why many seemingly chance things happen, but we can actually influence them, too. The key is recognizing that pure chance is almost nonexistent; we usually have some amount of control.

After spending much of the past decade studying thousands of people in his lab at the University of Hertfordshire, Wiseman has identified four main characteristics that make some people luckier than others. Better yet, he says, apply these principles to your life and you'll improve your luck today.

Make the Most of Random OpportunitiesPicture the events of your life on a spectrum, with chance at one end and control at the other, and most things playing out somewhere in between. The goal, Wiseman says, is to nudge yourself incrementally toward control. And the most obvious way to do that is to seize every random opportunity, big or small, to influence your luck—whether it's reading a book that catches your eye, talking to that attractive woman sitting next to you on the plane, or bothering to check under your bottle cap to see if you actually are a winner.

Wiseman began his research with a hunch: He suspected that unlucky people have the same number of random opportunities as lucky people, but that the less fortunate folks simply don't spot them. To figure out if he was right, he recruited two groups of people: some who considered themselves extraordinarily lucky and some who didn't. He gave people from both groups a newspaper and asked them to count the number of photographs inside.

Everybody started out the same, flipping pages, brows furrowed, counting pictures. But, consistently, the lucky people stopped halfway, while the unlucky people diligently plowed ahead. Wiseman had placed a message in the paper's center: "Stop counting. Tell the experimenter you have seen this and win £250." Written in type more than 2 inches high, it took up half the page. Yet, dependably, the lucky people saw it, and the unlucky people went on by.

Astonished, Wiseman set up a more in-depth experiment, selecting an unlucky woman named Brenda and a lucky man named Martin. He rigged a London city block with several hidden cameras leading to a coffee shop, as well as in the interior of the shop itself. He planted a £5 note on the pavement outside the shop and four accomplices on the inside. They sat at the shop's four tables, one stooge dressed as a successful businessman and the other three in casual clothes. They were all instructed to behave the same way for both Brenda and Martin.

When Martin arrived at the coffee shop, he immediately saw the money on the pavement and picked it up. Then he went inside, ordered a coffee, and sat near the successful businessman. He offered to buy the man a coffee, and within minutes they were deep in conversation.

When Brenda arrived, she stepped right over the money and went inside. She ordered a coffee, sat next to the businessman, and didn't say a word the entire time.

Later that day, Wiseman asked both of them whether anything lucky had happened to them. Martin told a funny story about how he'd found money on the street and had a chat with a successful businessman. Brenda just blinked.

Martin had gotten lucky simply by paying attention (finding money) and striking up a conversation (making a potential business contact)—two of Wiseman's most important tips for maximizing control over a situation. To improve your luck, Wiseman suggests "building and maintaining a strong luck network." This means doing a few uncomfortable things, like talking with strangers. Then, once you've made contact, keep it. Send a letter or make a quick call. Examples of this kind of good luck pop up all the time. The great Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura famously tells this lucky tale from his own life: As a young grad student, he went to play golf with a friend one day. On the course, they found themselves behind a pair of lovely young female golfers and soon joined them. At the end of the round, Bandura mustered the courage to ask one of the women out. Lucky him—they fell in love and ended up marrying.

A corollary here, Wiseman says, is that lucky people tend to stay more relaxed, even in pressure situations, which affords them more opportunity to spot lucky breaks. During the photo-counting experiment, for instance, the unlucky people entered the activity tense and hyperfocused, Wiseman says. They didn't allow their eyes to roam.

Another tip: Vary your routine every day. Wiseman compares the world to an orchard. If you only ever speak to your tight circle of friends and never try new things or visit new places, it's like remaining in one corner of the orchard. After a while, the trees in that corner go bare. You've exhausted your opportunities there. So visit new parts of the orchard, Wiseman says. That might mean taking a bold step, like enrolling in classes at a local university, or just walking a different path while running errands.

Act on Lucky HunchesWiseman cuts an odd figure in the scientific community. He's a respected psychologist but tends toward the unusual, like P.T. Barnum with a Ph.D. The day I met him, he had just put on a stage show at London's Soho Theatre that involved magic tricks, an examination of the Big Bang theory, and a contortionist who squeezed herself into a clear plastic cube. Wiseman is unafraid to wade into the murkier aspects of psychology, in other words, and that has come in extremely handy in his research on luck.

His second principle—act on your hunches—springs from the slippery world of the subconscious. Notions of intuition bring to mind the pseudo-science typical of late-night infomercials for psychic hotlines. The power of ESP. Reaching out to the other side. It's all nonsense, you might think. But Wiseman says you should never disregard a gut feeling or suspicion. To illustrate, consider this experiment at the University of Michigan: Psychologists showed people a series of squiggly lines. They then asked the subjects to describe the squiggles, but no one could—the images seemed too random. So the psychologists showed a longer series of squiggly images, including some from the first set. Could anyone pick out the familiar squiggles? Nope. Yet, when the psychologists asked which squiggles they "liked" best, subjects consistently chose examples from the first set. Their subconscious minds found them familiar and comforting.

This seemingly trivial experiment offered a profound look at the hidden reasons we do what we do. We might trust one man and not another, because of the way the former makes eye contact. We might pick an apartment because it's well lit and feels secure. We might even agree to a date based on a hunch. (Lucky people do make better choices when it comes to marriage, Wiseman has discovered.) These gut-level decisions aren't something you always recognize you're making, so when they result in good fortune, they feel more random than they actually are.

Wiseman tells the story of a conference he once attended at a large hotel, where an uneasy feeling struck him as he checked in at the reception desk. Something about the clerk. When it came time to pay for his room, Wiseman didn't hand over his credit card, but paid cash—something he'd never done before. Months later, he got a call from the hotel, searching for victims of fraud. Apparently, the clerk had stolen several credit-card numbers. Some people might just consider that chance, but Wiseman knew his subconscious had saved him. He says one of the quickest ways to increase your luck is simply by listening to that small, niggling voice that sometimes accompanies a big decision. "Treat it as an alarm bell," he says.

Consider the experience of Michael Henning, a young banker who was in London the day of the bombings. He'd walked into the Aldgate Underground station and stepped toward the nearest subway car. The bomber sat inside, already reaching to trigger his device. Henning paused at the door. Something about the car looked "busy." So he turned and walked toward the next car. He was 10 feet away when the bomb exploded. He's alive now because of that distance. "I am an incredibly lucky man," he says.

Likewise, when I first heard about problems on the trains that morning, the notion of terrorism flickered across my mind. Just a whisper of an echo from 9/11. When I watched the BBC and they described the problem as a mundane power surge, I felt foolish, a paranoid American. But, as it turns out, my hesitation—a tiny alarm bell, says Wiseman, even if I didn't recognize it at the time—may have saved my life.

Expect Good FortuneLuck pervades the world of sports. Sure, skill went a long way in helping Michael Jordan win six championships with the Bulls, but consider his legendary double-clutch, fadeaway buzzer-beater against the Cavaliers in the 1989 playoffs, with a defender in his face. No one, not even Jordan, could reasonably expect to hit a shot like that without some degree of luck. Likewise, Tiger Woods's golf swing is one of the purest expressions of skill in sports, but in the 2000 Masters, he shanked a ball into a stand of pines and then, instead of playing back onto the fairway like a normal human, threaded his shot through the trees and hit the green. Even he called the shot lucky. The point is that both Jordan and Tiger believed they would get lucky.

Taking that idea a step further, consider this: Throughout his career, Jordan always wore his lucky North Carolina Tar Heels shorts under his uniform, and Woods always wears red on the final day of a tournament. The lucky garments don't heighten jumping ability or straighten chip shots, of course, but research suggests the extra dose of confidence might. "It's the belief in belief," says Jackson Lears, a Rutgers professor and the author of Something for Nothing: Luck in America. "There's some psychological benefit there."

Researchers at Harvard conducted a simple experiment to test this type of confidence. The scientists asked two groups of people to trip a switch each time a light came on. Those in the first group were told to press the switch as quickly as possible and do their level best. The second group was told to imagine they were fighter pilots with superfast reflexes. The task was identical, but the second group's reaction times were much faster. They performed better simply because they expected to perform better.

On a more practical level, let's say you're on a blind date. You've heard good things about the young woman you're to meet, and as you approach her, you smile, because you expect to like her. The smile puts her at ease, and now she expects to like you, too. She smiles. And now—without a word spoken—both of you beam, and the date has started well. On the other hand, poor expectations and a furrowed brow might have ruined it from the outset, no matter what you might have in common.

On the surface, it sounds like common sense—"Just smile!"—but that's the beauty of it. Positive thinking tends to lead to positive results, says Wiseman. Here's another example: On my way to London, I stopped in tiny Skibbereen, Ireland, reputed to be the luckiest village on the island, because so many winning lottery tickets have been sold there. That's where a rosy-cheeked man named Chris Sayer told me this story: "I say you can do anything with luck. You just wish it, and it comes. I recently decided I wanted to see two women from my school days, and a few days later, I saw them both, eating together at a table. Luck." When I relayed this story to Wiseman, he nodded. "Of course," he said. "His expectation of good fortune didn't magically draw his friends to him, but it certainly increased the odds he might notice them when he walked by."

To prove just how powerful good expectations can be, Wiseman showed two groups—self-reported lucky and unlucky people—two puzzles, each formed by two interlocking metal pieces. He told each person one of the puzzles was possible to solve, and one was not. He also told them he had tossed a coin beforehand to determine which puzzle they'd attempt, but, in truth, he gave everyone the same solvable puzzle. Examining the puzzle, 60 percent of unlucky people said it was not solvable, versus 30 percent of the lucky people. No wonder more lucky people succeed in life, in love, in small metal puzzles. Unlucky people give up before they ever start.

Turn Bad Luck into GoodIn 1979, a wannabe actor was attacked in the street by three drunks. Talk about bad timing: It was the night before his first major audition. His face bruised and battered, his good looks no longer apparent, he chose to audition anyway. What luck: Turns out the producer wanted someone tough-looking and offered the part—the leading role in the movie Mad Max—to Mel Gibson on the spot.

According to Wiseman, we all should be grateful for our bad luck—at least some of it, anyway. He says bad luck often motivates or even forces us to make positive changes in our lives. That said, of all of his principles, this one is the hardest to swallow, because it sometimes requires simply outlasting the bad fortune around you. On the day of the bombings, I asked Wiseman if the people of London could turn their bad luck into good. "Sure," he answered. "You just hold on through bad fortune and wait for the good."

As the sun set that evening, the morning's chaos felt very distant. People dined at outdoor cafés, children played underfoot. Dogs crisscrossed parks with masters in tow, enjoying the long midsummer eve. The sun didn't hang on in the sky for one last glance, but dropped below the horizon as if nothing had happened. Life continued. The city stood.

On TV, a BBC reporter pulled aside an American family who'd just emerged from the wreckage of a train station. Soot covered the father's face; he had escaped by the slimmest margin. The reporter, with typical TV-tragedy gravitas, asked him, "What will you do now?"

The man considered it, looked around, and said, "Well, I think we'll go to the museum."

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